I really enjoy your vids and your interesting conversational approach. I don’t know why you don’t have more followers. Possibly we operate at a higher level not understandable by the masses. 😉 Thanks for your efforts!

It’s strange is it not, that ALL I am attempting to do when I take a photo of someone is capture some part of their soul. Like a lot of things in life, depending on what you believe it is either adding something to the world or taking something away.

Great idea to get B&H to sponsor this challenge. I think B&H should look for further opportunities to partner with you. You are intelligent, enthusiastic, have engaging personality, have a great voice and speaking ability, can categorize things in your mind so what you say comes out logically and have a true love of photography! Wish you the best. NYC is awesome!

Henri Cartier-Bresson is my idol. He is one of the reasons why I fell in love with the street photography genre. I went to his exhibition (HCB Foundation) in Paris last year and it was an awesome experience for me. The insight on your interview about how he really felt about the word "The Decisive Moment" was a big information for me and the "Image on the Run" really makes sense on how he approach his photography on the streets. Thanks for this! I submitted some photos for your first challenge, just wanted to showcase my love for street photography. Cheers! and Happy Shooting!

Hey, great challenge and awesome channel. I’m in Canada, Toronto to be precise, so question is: can international viewers participate in the contest? Or is B&H only considering American participants eligible for the prize? Cheers!

Well done. I watched that interview and enjoyed it a great deal. I've read a lot about Bresson as well as his own books. He often talked about getting between the shirt and the skin of his subject. He did not like the term street photography, and felt that calling oneself and artist was a bourgeois concept. Be that as is may he studied his composition as a painter and sketch artist. He had a studied understanding of composition. He was able to read a scene visually like a musician read music, on the fly, in his mind, and this, in my opinion, was his greatest strength.

I have the book, it is a classic; yes I can see it would wind Bresson up, that image represents everything he hates (it coined decisive moment and its CROPPED!!!) and its his epitaph. It is funny that people are much less important than ideas. When an idea catches it can cause a conflagration far outside their immediate influence. Decisive Moment is exactly what it is, its the moment the shutter is pressed. Until that moment everything is negotiable, what you are seeing, how you select from it, choice of lens aperture blah blah blah. All we see is what the result was when that shutter was pressed, it was the decisive moment and it is the most important idea in photographic history; it almost defines the essence of the craft; it is more important than Bresson. It defines my photography, I take complex hyperfocal street scenes and must involve the interaction of many people who are all moving independently and are otherwise not connected. My decisive moment is when that scene gels and patterns lock into place for a nanosecond. a second later there is no picture. By definition it will be cropped, none of my photos are the shape of the sensor; many are XPan format panaramas. Bresson would be turning in his grave but we must push the envelope forward, we must do something new, unique and different. As Picasso reminded us; we must kill our fathers, sorry Henri. Tomorrow I will go to Tate Modern London for the Picasso Blockbuster and will be taking one of my street cameras, probably my GX9 with Olympus 17mm f1.8 or my Leica X113, we shall see what I will get on the streets of London; scarey huh he he

My wife hates being photographed. She (half) jokingly says that the camera is stealing her soul. Since she is such an uncomfortable model, almost all my photos of her are candid grabs when she's relaxed. I like them, but she mostly hates them. So.

Now that I think about it.. In some way that aboriginal belief doesn't feel so wrong – the more we snap away, the more hollow the moment becomes, in this pocket computer camera driven world now.

Hits a bit late but, how many photos (selfies in particular), how many moments behind the photos do we as a society really hold dear under the flood of image media we consume (and create) every day? Something to think about I suppose, but this just somewhat clicked in my head now that you mentioned that old belief in this video. Curious how that works.

I guess it goes with a mantra I've been discovering for myself, the longer I've been into photography: to capture a real, felt moment, you so often first have to live and experience it for yourself. A participant's view is always more engaging, more heart filled, than an onlooker's. We're often a part of the moment as the photographer, if by directly influence on what we depict or not, and I think that's important to remember and cherish.

Obviously this applies mostly to works of passion (by God that kind of standard for every shot would make a professional gig hell..), but it's something that's helped me a lot recently with picking when I dig out the camera, rather than have it dangling at all times and just snapping what ends up as, to a large extent, duds. Let me know if this seems awfully cluttered or incomprehensible, it's really just come up as you mentioned the quote on my walk home from the subway station. I really shouldn't type out posts this long on a phone.

Now time to rewatch the video, got completely lost in my own tangent – oops.

Amazon Affiliate Disclosure

Digital Photography News is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.